After quipping, “I can’t spend all my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead,” Obama responded to Williams’s question about whether the doubt about his religion reflected his inability to communicate with voters with an answer that had echoes of Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy” comment.

“The facts are the facts,” Obama told Williams. “We went through some of this during the campaign — there is a mechanism, a network of misinformation that in a new media era can get churned out there constantly.”

Palin thought Williams should have pressed him on what he was implying with these comments.

“My first reaction was listening to Brian Williams and wondering, ‘Brian, that’s some stealth reporting. You’re not even going to follow up and ask him what in the heck is Barack Obama talking about. What is he insinuating’?
I was pretty appalled at that notion that Brian Williams was just letting him get away with that kind of false accusation that there is some kind of suggested right-wing conspiracy again, especially knowing that the media still — the mainstream, lame-stream media — they’re in his back pocket, still.”